Some of the top performing businesses appear to operate seamlessly. One secret is that many of these companies have a business operations plan.
Daily tasks supporting revenue goals performed in different departments such as marketing, sales, finance, client/customer service, etc. could all be included in a business operations plan. In this episode, you will learn more about how to build a business operations plan.
Our host and CEO Porschia, alongside our guest, Rebecca Brizi, will share their insight on the significance of business operations plans and how they are more detailed than the standard business plan.
Rebecca Brizi is Owner of the business consulting firm R G Brizi. She believes that every business is unique and it’s her job to find that unique recipe to couple with essential business foundations. Rebecca applies the “So What Test” to build a plan that makes business management simple for her clients.
What you’ll learn:
- Fundamentals of business operations
- The difference between a business plan and a business operations plan
- Tips on how to overcome resistance to business planning
- The biggest issues with business operations plans
- How you can address operational processes as a generalist, which can lead to “confident delegation”
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today,
we are talking about Business Operations 101, Building a Business Operations Plan with Rebecca
Breese. Ask
12 Italian grandmothers for their tomato sauce recipe, and you’ll get 13 different answers. They will all use tomatoes, olive oil, and basil, but the details will vary, as will the one special ingredient everyone has.
Rebecca Breezy, Management Consultant with [00:01:00] RG Breezy, believes that just like a tomato sauce recipe, every business is unique in its outcome, and her job is to find the unique recipe to couple with essential business foundations. She applies a simple test to all her clients businesses. The so what test it tells her what is unique, what is important and how to build a plan that will make business management simple.
Hi, Rebecca. How are you
Rebecca: today? Hi, Portia. I’m well. How are you? I am
Porschia: doing well. I love that recipe analogy with business. I love it. It’s very creative.
Rebecca: Thank you.
Porschia: Yeah. Well, I’m excited to have you with us to discuss business operations 101, building a business operations plan. But first we want to know a little more about you.
So tell me about seven year old Rebecca.
Rebecca: Oh, seven year old Rebecca was was a [00:02:00] Fairly happy kid going through life. What, I’ll tell you if I may about age range, let’s say 7 to 12 or 14. What was particular that possibly shaped me later in life. I grew up in a multilingual home. My parents are two different nationalities.
In a multilingual country, Switzerland has four official languages. And so as a young child already, languages are something that always came easily to me. And I remember when I was little, people would ask me so often, it seemed very often to me, what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I always remember thinking, what a terrible question.
I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. One thing, I don’t know a lot, but one thing I do know is I don’t know what it means to be a grown up. I’m seven, eight, nine years old, and so I have no clue, and I’d like to learn all the things possible. And see where life leads me, where this reasoning was particular is that in Switzerland, as [00:03:00] in a lot of countries in Europe, obligatory school ends in Switzerland at 15, after which students choose a specialization.
So they’re either going to go to a skill training, a trade school, and even if they go to high school. They’re different high schools. So you go to a language high school, economics, science, etc. In fact, they’re making a long term decision at a very young age. And because perhaps specifically because people started asking me this at a young age, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was thinking about it so much, I really didn’t want to have to make that commitment.
When I was 15, and my brain wasn’t fully formed yet. So that was actually a big driver for me to want to come to university in the United States, where one doesn’t have to choose a major until, one is 20 or so, you’ve already started a university, and specifically to study in a liberal arts college, where I knew that I would be not just exposed to, but required to learn a [00:04:00] lot of different subjects.
So, rather than having Such a strong core curriculum and then going into a college, the requirements actually were about having one major, but then spreading the other class credits amongst all the different departments. So, yeah I think that there was that urge early on precisely because I was so aware of.
I have no idea what I want to be or what I want to do. And I do believe that’s also driven my interest in being somewhat of a generalist. I like to know about a lot of different things and then how they go together. And that’s always been my drive in life rather than being a specialist, knowing a lot in great depth about a single thing.
That’s brought me here.
Porschia: Wow. I’m always fascinated by people who are multilingual and I know that you speak a few different languages. And I think that people who are multilingual, I personally think they’re super smart because you’ve got to use different sides of your [00:05:00] brain and different languages to me have different, well, of course they have different rules, but.
I think there are different tones and different mindsets. So I’m pretty sure, yeah, we talked about this actually when we first met, but I lived in Germany from ages two to 10. So, like in Switzerland they speak German and, the mindset to speak German for me is very different than when I’m speaking English.
And in Germany they also have High school students specialize the way that, they do in Switzerland. So I am familiar with that. And I think it’s really cool that you decided to get into a different system in the U. S. to where you could make your own decision later on and really have your own timeline.
So that’s very cool. Rebecca, very cool. So what was your first
Rebecca: job? I believe my first job was working at an ice cream stand I think when I was about 14 or 15, maybe 14, and I think that was my first job, the first, official paid job. There was, there’s [00:06:00] a move an ice cream brand called Move and Peak in it’s actually a restaurant chain and they have their, they sell their own ice cream.
best ice cream in Switzerland. It’s phenomenal. But there was a ice cream stand downtown in the place where I lived. And a friend of mine had a big crush on the boy who worked there. And so we would swing by, in the summer we’re hanging around, we’d swing by fairly regularly. So so they could chat.
And then at a certain point, we swung by for a few days, and he was never there. So she was quite bold. She walked inside and said, Where is he? We haven’t seen him in a while. And they said, we don’t know, he hasn’t been showing up. Do you guys, we need somebody to sell ice cream. Do you want to do it? And so we said, Yeah, okay, absolutely.
So I got to sell my favorite ice cream and learn to make wafer cones and do all that, but what I will say is I From a, I’ve always liked to work. And I think it’s twofold. I’ve always liked to be productive. I don’t, I like to feel that I’m spending my time creating something or doing something, even if it’s not something work [00:07:00] related or useful, but just something.
And I also really liked from that very first job, the idea that I could make money, and this was astounding to me. I. Like many children, I believe, I had an allowance, that my parents would provide and was strictly calculated based on whatever they thought my needs were, and this idea that I could go out and use a skill or my time or my brain and people would provide.
Thank you. give me money for it was just astounding. And so from there, I started working at first every summer and eventually, part time when I was in sort of college and grad school. But yeah, I always, I just always really liked being productive and I really liked this idea that it gave me a feeling of control over my life.
I can create something or do something and that gives me this money, which gives me autonomy. Yeah,
Porschia: yeah. So Rebecca, tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your business.
Rebecca: My, A very early job I had or [00:08:00] early in my working career was a job that I did not like.
And I started working and it had been a job that I’d been working hard to get. So then I get the job and I’m working in an industry that I wanted to work in and it all felt very meaningful to me. And then I started working and I just didn’t like it. I, it just, I dreaded going to work in the morning.
But I’ll also say I’m at that age where I think my generation was right on the cusp of this idea that a job is a job and you just show up and do it and, you don’t complain versus the generation we have certainly now, which is, following something that you believe in and spending your time doing that and I was just before that, I think, right?
Right before that shift happened. But I was fortunate. I was talking to my parents one day complaining about work, on and on, and they said something to the effect of, Oh, gee, that’s too bad that you don’t like your job. And that was a pivotal moment for me, because it was just very… Obvious all of a sudden that, of course, you’re supposed to like your [00:09:00] job.
It’s insane to spend at least 48 hours a week doing something that you hate doing and waking up every morning with dread. It’s a terrible way to live. And so that was a big moment when I thought, wait it’s true that I, this was supposed to be my dream job. But now that I’m in the reality of it, I see a different side of it and it’s okay.
That it turns out not to be my dream job. It’s okay that I was wrong. And And the first thing, in my opinion, is always to look at what you’re doing and can you make it better. And then, if you can’t, if it’s really just the wrong place, then, then do what you can to find something that is a better place.
So that has been a big driver to me, but now it is also part of what I want to see happen with my clients. I know it is possible to wake up every morning excited about The day that’s to come, and my work isn’t done until my clients are waking up every morning excited about their business
Porschia: as well. Yeah, so I think that’s a good segue.
What made you decide [00:10:00] to start your own business?
Rebecca: It was a, it was slow progress in, in me coming to that decision. I worked in a software company for 12 years and the work I was doing in house is the same as the work I do now as a consultant. When I first started it, I realized, I knew that I was bringing value.
to this business. I knew that I was productive and doing things that drove the business forward and were useful, but I was struggling to put a definition on it. I couldn’t just say, I’m doing marketing or I’m doing customer service or I’m doing, and I really didn’t know how to define it. It was a very small business.
So that’s part of it. One wears many hats in a small business. And so I, but I really wanted to be able to point to it. I wanted to be able to say, this is what I’m doing, this is why I’m here, specifically and concisely. So I examined that as much as I could. One particular moment was… I was telling my brother about this and I was trying to explain my role and [00:11:00] it would take me so many words to do it.
And he suggested that I read the E Myth the book, the E Myth. And that did begin to help me define. So that was an eyeopening moment. And the premise of the E Myth is that each business Owner or each business requires at least three roles and I’ll get the terminology wrong, but it’s a visionary with the idea and the dream and a manager who makes things happen and then a tactician or a technician who does, performs the actions.
The tactical skills and so on. And so that began to give order to my thoughts. Over the years, then I continued to focus on this and think about this sort of on my own and define what it was that I was doing for this business to the point that I felt that I had created a product I could created a system of business management that I thought was probably something that could be replicated across businesses that could be picked up and Put into another business customized as [00:12:00] required and function that I’d found some foundations of this that could be almost universally applied.
And so that was a big part of it. It was part of the drive was I want to prove the concept that I think I’ve built here and see if it’s real. I believe that it is and the fact that I knew that was my strongest. Skill in what I was bringing was actually the creation of that plan and the determination of what those steps were and what the foundations of an operational plan were that was really where I was strongest and so the idea of being able to do that over and over because I’m doing it for so many businesses rather than in house for a single business that was very appealing.
Porschia: Got it. And so to your point about Being a generalist, I can hear how your knowledge, it sounds like of other parts of the business, you could incorporate into the plans that you were creating for that company. So[00:13:00] I hear definitely some passion around that, but how did you decide to focus on consulting specifically with your business when there were, other things that you could do?
Rebecca: I did explore for a while. I spent a few months looking at options. The business I had been in, I had joined at a startup phase. So I was thinking, do I need to, do I want to find a new startup? And get to do this over, build up a new business. Do I want to work in an incubator? And that did attract me for quite a while.
Thinking of, doing that sort of work in some sort of startup or new business incubator and do mentoring or training there do I want to work independently as a consultant looking at all these different options and speaking to as many people as possible? There’s nothing greater than direct communication, even in self exploration to.
to examine and to really learn about all these different options and start trying to picture myself in those scenarios. What the requirements would be, what my day [00:14:00] to day would be, what the expectations on me and from me would be. And of all those things, consulting Seem to constantly check all the right boxes.
And and part of it was it did give me that freedom to really be able to say I have my own thing and I want to, I really, as I said, part of the urge was to prove the concept that I had created a system that could work. And so that was a big part of it too. And again, consulting gave me the full freedom to really be able to create that proof.
Yeah.
Porschia: So Rebecca, many of our clients who are business owners are overwhelmed with the sheer number of things that need to get done in their business. From your experience, what are the main aspects of business operations?
Rebecca: To simplify it vastly, business operations is knowing what a business has to do and why it has to do those particular things.[00:15:00]
The struggle that comes, that causes the situation you’re describing of being overworked or chaotic, is A, not giving enough emphasis to why that so what test is an essential part of that. And B, even that first part, looking at what to do, it’s either trying to do all the things or following some formula.
that we’ve read about or learned about or seen somebody else perform. That formula may work very well in that context that we learned it from, for the person who wrote that book, for our colleague who runs a different business. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it works or certainly not in an exact replica in your own business.
So even the what requires introspection. It requires some analysis within the context of the specific business. So the, which leads us perfectly into operations. I mean, that’s what we are looking at here. The first thing I like to do with any business I work with is really determine what [00:16:00] does this business actually have to do to be successful?
And a big part of that Is allowing us, allowing ourselves to say, which means it doesn’t have to do all of these other things. And that can seem impossible at first, but once we delve into it, and once we start to say, what does it have to do and why? What does success look like when these things are happening?
Then it suddenly becomes quite easy to actually learn to say, we can stop doing these other things. [00:17:00] I love what you said,
Porschia: and I think all of it was so meaningful and the point that I want to echo as far as I can echo it is something that I see with a lot of our clients who are business owners, a lot of times they have worked with someone maybe another Owner business coach or business consultant, and they’ve gotten frustrated by trying to force their business into that business consultants formula.
Or there are a lot of business coaches I think that are coaching people to create the exact same business that they have. And people feel frustrated when they’re trying to use someone’s magical blueprint that doesn’t work for their own business. And , one of the things I like to tell to a lot of our clients is that we are really looking at your business and not trying to necessarily make it a carbon copy of someone else’s [00:18:00] or mine.
And I just love that you said that Rebecca, because I think that a lot of people beat themselves up about that.
Rebecca: Yeah, we set these standards and expectations that actually end up being the standards and expectations of a completely different business. And it’s unfair to our business and it’s unfair to ourselves.
The actual individual business owners, there’s a personal stress that, it’s not just a business problem. It does become a cause of stress and potentially burnout when we are setting expectations for ourselves that just don’t function in our context. So absolutely it’s each business.
Business advice is a wonderful thing, which needs to then be adopted and adapted into the particular context that everybody’s working in. I love it. I love it.
Porschia: So how would you describe the difference between a business plan and a business operations plan?
Rebecca: In simplest terms, a business operations plan is less broad and more detailed [00:19:00] than a business plan.
Now a business plan is going to cover all aspects of a business. In a sense, this is a generalist document because a business plan has to talk about the market, the product, the HR. Everything that goes into a business. And the purpose of a business plan is to prove that this idea is a viable business.
And to do that, it’s not enough to say we’ve got a viable product, right? That’s, that proves it’s a viable product. To prove it’s a viable business, all of those elements need to be proven as well. A business operations plan is more it’s more specific than that. So the business operations plan is more about what does this business do every day.
to function and to create success. So in a sense it is, to the point of being a generalist, it is relevant, or all parts of the business are relevant to a business operations plan because it will touch on all of those, but it does not require in depth [00:20:00] specialization, tactical skills, and so on of each of those different departments.
One can write a business operations plan without being a marketing specialist or an HR specialist and so on. The business plan itself is, again, covers all those areas. And again, one can write a business plan without being a specialist in those areas. But as to repeat, the business plan presents the business as a whole, the operations more specifically are how this business functions.
And yes, all parts of the business are relevant to that. But we’re not here necessarily to prove the model in the operations plan. We’re here to just demonstrate how it works. In
Porschia: your opinion, what are the steps to building a business
Rebecca: operations plan? Starting with why these things have to happen. I’m a very big fan on starting with qualitative goals.
Another challenge I see with business owners is a big focus on quantitative goals. Quantitative goals are important. Let nobody say that I would ever suggest that they don’t matter. They absolutely matter. [00:21:00] Sales goals, revenue goals, finance goals, production goals. All matter. They come from the qualitative goals, however.
So putting in place, first of all, an understanding of why does this business exist? What does it look like when it is successful? What should it be doing to achieve that success? How is it going to be known on the market? What are the important reputational elements of this business? Putting those factors in place first, then allow the quantitative goals to be realistic and applicable possible achievable because they’re coming from that qualitative expectation.
So that for me is always step one is what business are we actually building here? How is it going to be known? How is it going to operate? What is the personality of this business in many ways?
Porschia: That is great. I, to your point, I definitely think a lot of people skip over those qualitative goals. So after we’ll say a business owner has those qualitative goals down, what should their [00:22:00] next step
Rebecca: be?
The next step is to make those apparent across the whole business. Now, whether the business is two people or two hundred, it still is a step that has to be performed. So, even if you’re a small business owner, and you meet all your people, there’s five of you, you meet around a table, you see them every day, It still is its own dedicated step.
It’s not enough to expect the people around you to just know these things by osmosis, just because they’re spending a lot of time with you. So putting those qualitative goals in place, putting that brand personality in place, that’s one way we could call it. To then make sure that everybody in the business is on the same page about that.
That they understand the purpose and mission of the business. That they understand all those qualitative aspects that are relevant to the business. Company values, company behaviors, and so on. That is the most important next step. Because when those first two steps are performed correctly, it allows the business owner A lot of opportunity for [00:23:00] confident delegation.
When the team understands those things as well as the business owner, it is so much easier for them, that business owner to say, okay, you know what the standards are. You know what the expectations are. You are now my tactical expert in, customer service or in marketing or in the craft of the business.
You can create qualitative goals. You can create process and expectations. And. And you present those to me, a business owner approves them, but it makes it so much easier for that business owner to not actually have to do the minute procedures, those steps, step by step of what exactly is happening for each part of their business.
Porschia: That’s great. And I love what you said about confident delegation. I like that distinction. We’ll talk about delegation all the time, but confidently delegating is a different story. I’ve had some clients tell me that they are apprehensive about creating plans and strategies, especially when they are first getting started, [00:24:00] because they think that it’s all going to change anyway.
So what would be your response to someone who
Rebecca: feels that way? I completely agree. It absolutely is all going to change and that’s a really important part of creating the right plan or the right strategy. Those two things are not incompatible by any means. And we go back to qualitative goals. So when we can say this business exists for this reason, has this mission, has these values.
Those things are not going to change all the time. Those things, if they change, which they probably won’t, but even when they do, they change very slowly and very rarely. So when those things are in place and the environment around us is changing, or even our own business internally is changing, it allows us to adapt to those changes without losing all the work that came before, but also without making a wrong decision, so to speak.
How do we know that we’re adapting correctly? Well, so long as we’re staying on track for that mission, as long as we are [00:25:00] respecting those values, so long as we are recognizing those qualitative goals and can still achieve those, then to me, within that framework, there is a lot of freedom to adapt and to make changes.
I’m a big fan of making changes halfway through a plan. Absolutely. Take opportunities as they arise or on the flip side of that deal with challenges as they arise, when they require change, make the change. From your perspective,
Porschia: what are some of the biggest issues you’ve seen with business operations
Rebecca: plans?
A common one, I’d say, is that focus on the tactical steps. When people think of an operations plan or when people think of process, there’s a lot of focus on, well, this is what we have to do. So an analogy I often use here is opening a door, right? So we think of how do we open the door? All right the instruction.
The operation, or
the process for opening a door, a lot of people will say, open door. So that is [00:26:00] both too broad and also too detailed at the same time. Telling people to open a door means that those people could kick in the door, right? Or they could remove the door from its hinges. All of these things will allow them to get to Bypass the door and get into the room, which is the goal of opening the door.
But no business owner probably wants their employees to be kicking in doors. They want them to use a door handle, apply gentle pressure, open the door without slamming it open, all these sorts of things. How does an employee know that’s the expectation? Qualitative goals. So we go right back to when We present at a client business, shall we say, we are going to open the door in a way that is gentle and respectful, but still lets our presence here be known.
Now, I’m using a banal example, of course, nobody’s telling people how to open doors, but I use that to illustrate the fact of demonstrating or agreeing those qualitative expectations [00:27:00] then allows each employee to be able to say, well, this door has a door handle, that other door is automatic so it doesn’t matter that I don’t have those detailed procedures.
Because if I had a door without a door handle and I’ve been told to use the door handle, what do I do? So that’s one of the biggest challenges that I see for a lot of people is when they look at operations, when they look at process, they’re thinking too detailed, but at the same time they’re also not thinking detailed enough.
So they’re trying to tell people this is exactly how to do all these things or exactly what to do, as opposed to telling them. This is what I expect to happen with your part of the business. This is why you’ve been hired, or this is why you exist in this business. Here are the standards that I expect you to live up to or to respect when you’re working for this business.
Now you go out and figure out the best way to do it, and I trust you to do that. As a business owner, you track and you measure those results, right? You’re not blind to what’s happening, but you’re also not micromanaging all the activities in your business. Tell us more about your
Porschia: [00:28:00] company, RG Breezy.
Rebecca: Yes, thank you. It’s process consulting, operations consulting, everything we’ve been talking about. My clients come to me with all the challenges we’ve discussed and similar challenges relating to the challenges we’ve discussed. What I do a lot of is write mission statements, write guiding principles, write value propositions.
And what I’m doing with those is creating tools. It’s like building a toolbox that they can then use to do all the things we’ve been talking about, make decisions, run their business, instruct their employees. And I do that with small businesses, generally under 50 employees, a variety of different industries working directly with those business owners.
Again, in that sort of generalist sense, the business owners are making decisions for all parts of their business. In addition to that, all my services are flat feed and can be done either in person or virtually. So I’m happy to talk to people. Anywhere and in any industry. Great.
Porschia: We’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show [00:29:00] notes so people can find you online.
But what is the best way for someone to get in
Rebecca: touch with you? So you either use the contact form on my website, which is rgbreetsy. com or LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn every day and I’m happy to connect with anybody who wants to share stories or opinions or ideas. So do feel free to find me on LinkedIn and I check those messages every day.
Porschia: Great. So Rebecca, I have one more question that I like to ask everyone. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career or in their business?
Rebecca: If I could only say one thing, then it would be know how you want to be known. And whether you are an individual, as an employee, as running a business, whether you’re a business owner, whatever your situation is, there’s a lot of power in knowing how you want to be known as an, as a person.
And, how do you want your managers [00:30:00] and colleagues to know you as a business? How do you want your clients and employees? and suppliers to know you. If you can answer the question of what do you hope these people will say about you behind your back when you can’t hear them, then that can give a lot of direction in terms of what am I doing to be that person and to create that response in people?
And what do I need to change or be consistent about in order to get there? Well, Rebecca, you have
Porschia: shared a lot of insights with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident in their business operations. We appreciate
Rebecca: you being with us. Thank you for having me. It’s been fun. [00:31:00]
